The killing fields

AMAZON.COM lists more than 36,000 books on the American Civil War, and my guess is that most of them depict battles and heroes, and describe wartime deaths as noble and tragic. Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering" does something different. It's a shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying -- how Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it.

Some 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War. In proportion to the nation's population, that's six times its death rate in World War II. A similar rate today -- in the Iraq war, for example -- would mean 6 million American deaths. Mass killing, it turns out, didn't require advanced technology like air power and carpet bombing; the humble musket and rifle were sufficient -- along with disease, which was responsible for two-thirds of the fatalities. It was worst in the South, where one in five white men of military age died.

At the outset, both sides assumed the war would be brief -- the kind of "cakewalk" the Bush White House expected would follow after we invaded Iraq. In 1861, as in 2003, the generals had no conception of the years of fighting and waves of death that would follow.

Faust is the new president of Harvard University. Before that, she was dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and published five books on the Civil War era. Here she describes the aftermath of battle: "Men thrown by the hundreds into burial trenches; soldiers stripped of every identifying object before being abandoned on the field; bloated corpses hurried into hastily dug graves; nameless victims of dysentery or typhoid interred beside military hospitals; men blown to pieces by artillery shells; bodies hidden by woods or ravines, left to the depredations of hogs or wolves or time." Since there was no official identification of the dead or notification of families -- dog tags were not required until World War I -- family members flocked to battle sites to reclaim the bodies. There they found "scavengers seeking to rob the dead, entrepreneurial coffin makers and embalmers, and swarms of tourists" with morbid imaginations.

In the Civil War, unlike modern conflicts, killing was intimate: "[S]oldiers were often able to see each other's faces and to know whom they had killed." This made it harder for good Protestant boys to ignore the Sixth Commandment, but they were all assured that God was on their side. Snipers were considered immoral because they did not confront their victims face to face; one soldier wrote that sniper fire was "sickening, murderous, unnatural, uncivilized" -- although it seems a good deal less so compared with today's technological battle strategies.